The subject disclosure relates to the use of a flow reactor to facilitate one or more ring-opening polymerizations, and more specifically, to using one or more flow reactors to facilitate one or more ring-opening polymerizations and/or post-polymerization modifications.
The United States federal government publishes regulations (e.g., Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)) to ensure the quality of pharmaceutical compounds, medical devices, and/or food. These regulations can regard the manufacturing, processing, packaging, and/or formulation of various products. Moreover, these regulations address issues of production, starting materials, sanitation, cleanliness of equipment, and/or monitoring through requisite tests. To meet these regulations, traditional industrialization techniques in the chemical industry have included batch processing, in which a series of operations are carried out over a period of time on a separate, identifiable item or parcel of material. Numerous chemical process industries retain batch processing as their primary method of manufacture. For example, products traditionally manufactured by batch processing can include pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, dyestuffs, food additives, vitamins, and/or the like. For instance, numerous polymers, such as polyesters and/or polycarbonates, have been traditionally manufactured using batch processing.
However, batch processing can be time-consuming, require the design of manufacturing stages that can be difficult to reproduce, can necessitate adverse safety conditions (e.g., due to the transportation of chemicals and/or storage of volatile chemicals), can require a large labor force, and/or can be difficult to automate.